Watching the current trends and future direction of Oracle's Applications

Monday, March 19, 2012

Mismatch

Spent my weekend in Nashville, presenting a couple of workshops as part of an ODTUG-HEUG joint effort at Alliance. Learned that I really dig the Alliance conference. Had to bug out early this year, but stay for the entire conference next year.

The hot topic in the audience? Service-based integration. That's mainly driven by the splitting of Peoplesoft HCM and Campus Solutions. Concerns over data stovepipes and maintenance costs of tightly- coupled integrations are also driving the interest here.

This is not a small market of customers and users. In a time of reduced state and federal funding, close to 4,000 people showed up for Alliance 12. And they want to know more about services-based integration...big chunk of people with a need.

Been hearing quite a bit of lamenting over the past few year, especially in the U.S., about the demise of the developer. Not enough work anymore, compensation not what it used to be, all the jobs going away, and so on...

So I'm leading these workshops at Alliance with rooms full of business people, directors and CIOs as well as techie people. They're all thirsting for more info on services-based integration. And then the thought hit me like a thunderclap - the developer demise, to a great degree, is caused by a mismatch.

I see an undercurrent of resistance in the Oracle developer community in taking up Fusion Middleware development tools: BPM, SOA, ADF, etc. Some of that resistance may be for good technical reasons...some pretty bright people are pushing back.

But fact of the matter is, technical issues notwithstanding, customers want and need what Fusion Middleware offers. I just ran into a big segment of users, customers, clients and employers who are digging into services-based integration. Those of us in the developer community may need to reconsider the law of supply and demand, and get on with the process of matching our skills to the demands of our customers.

Special note to developers attending KScope 12: think about that law of supply and demand again. Then take another look at that Fusion Middleware track.